Sunday, September 10, 2006: Elko, NV to Laramie, WY

s: The next part is supposed to be a boring drive, into Utah, the salt flats, Salt Lake City. It's not really all that boring, if you have a reasonably active curiosity about things—there are mountains of interesting shape, flora and fauna different from home, and odd sights here and there. Also, you can kind of fast-forward some parts by mixing petroleum and air and feeding the mixture to the engine by a clever foot-pedal linkage built into the car (the maximum speed limit is 75 in Nevada and Utah).

We stop at Wendover for gas and a dog break. Wendover is the first chance to gamble for west-bound Utahns (I think I'll never need to know exactly how to pronounce that) and other Easterners, and the last chance for us to gas up before SLC. (Can I work in the crude joke where you replace the initials of Wendover Will? No, best not to go there this early in the trip.) Ahem! Be all that as it may, to step into Wendover is to fall knee-deep into middle-American culture. We will not register to win the Peterbilt (and again decline to take the low road—but stay with us!), feed junk food to the ravens, plunk down money at the Red Garter (enticing as the leg motion on that neon sign is), nor pick any sunflowers.

This is the first place, however, where we're puzzled by the gasoline. It sounds like a great deal, but we find that the "regular" here is 85 octane instead of the 87 octane in California. Does it matter? I end up splitting the difference on the rest of the trip, usually getting 85 but mixing in 87 once or twice. I get 85 here and notice no difference in the quality of our petroleum and air mixture as we do experiments with the speedometer on the remaining stretches through Nevada.

Laika indulges in a wade and drink in a deep puddle of various truckstop liquids of unknown octane. I drag at her leash to get her away from it, but as soon as she's handed over to Steve, she's happily splashing around in it again. Dogs!

I steer her away from that after the initial sniff! But somehow dogs, with their fine sense of smell a hundred times better than ours, sniff out and are attracted to the grossest stuff.

The Salt Flats:

(Repeat 100 times for a general feeling of the great Salt Flats. Do it really, really fast for the Land Speed Record Attempt experience.)

A little past the eastern edge of the Salt Flats, we stop for a stretch at a "no services" exit. I imagine it a photographer's paradise, and take a few pictures there (wide-angle seems appropriate):

The profusion of broken glass and spent shotgun shells is a little disturbing here, but the diner IS for sale; hey, it might be someone's lifelong dream to have a diner that never lacks for salt...

Not only spent shells, but the sounds of gunshots ringing against the nearby hills! They are too far away to sound threatening, but the place is a little creepy nonetheless. I watch Laika sniff and sniff and hope she doesn't find a body, while swallows dart around us and the buildings.

Onward, then, to Salt Lake City, where I will also not stoop to humor about Brigham Young or the HBO series "Big Love."

We hit a recommended dog park in SLC, but find it has no fences. We have a light lunch and continue.

The abandoned truck stop may have been a little creepy, but Salt Lake City really creeps me out. The sun is beating down and everything looks polarized. The buildings, the park entrance, everything seems straight and at right angles, with sharp, defined edges. We ask a local about the possible location of the dog park within the park, and he seems almost desperate to plead ignorance. Steve is willing to try another park, but I'm happy to just have some lunch and leave.

	After Salt Lake City, we are in the Rockies almost immediately, and Wyoming not long after that. We climb past ski resort ads and big ranches.
I discover the Stitch Assist mode on the camera here. Here, then, a picture of a nice little recreational lake, composed of six individual shots "stitched" together. Have I mentioned yet how much I love my new camera?

I'm surprised by how rapidly the terrain changes immediately after leaving Salt Lake City. Suddenly we're into red rock and high-desert vegetation. My excitement about being on vacation grows.

Sooner than I expect, we're entering Wyoming, the first time I've been in this state. I've imagined it as the place of cowboys and the setting of some of the western novels I read as a teenager. It does not disappoint! Wyoming is full of big sky and buttes and Pronghorn Antelope.

Next stop: "Little America." This is pretty much a town where none previously existed. The story as I remember it: the founder got lost out on the Wyoming prairie (not really prairie; it's pretty flat, but at high elevation, part of the Rockies) in the winter, and vowed that if he survived, he would come back and create a haven there for weary travelers. Now it's a chain, with instances in lonely and difficult places all over the U.S., like Salt Lake City, Flagstaff, San Diego, and Sun Valley. Billboards for several miles have advertised their 50-cent (soft-serve) ice cream cones. Still, it has that tinge of history they couldn't entirely homogenize out of it, and everyone is smiling and has ice cream, so it's a nice stop overall. Note purple and other-colored sage and the penguins on the bell tower.

It's clear we aren't going to make it to Denver tonight, but I'd like to get far enough to make it a short trip tomorrow. We set sight on Rock Springs, then Rawlins, then Laramie. We make one little stop when I can't stand how beautiful the sunset is getting (do click the thumbnail images!):

The Wyoming max speed limit is also 75 mph, but regular intermittent stretches of construction take it down to 65 and sometimes 55. We make it to Laramie somewhat late, but find an oddly reasonable (is that an oxymoron?) motel and Laika gets to jump up and down on the beds.

I think we've done over 700 miles on this day, and we land at Motel 6 tired and confused. We bump the car through parking lots and abandoned lots, trying to find our way back onto a side street where the Motel 6 looms. Once there, it takes us much too long to figure out how to use a calling card to dial out of the place. This is where I first realize how much we've tried to pack into a week's vacation. We're tired, and older than we'd like to admit.

Laika seems to be the least affected; she is a bundle of sheer joy of being out of the back seat of the car, and is all over Steve when she finds out she's allowed on the bed again.